Painting From Another Planet brought together the work of 10 Los Angeles-based painters who were putting the art back into artifice. Shamelessly fake, their canvases and panels favored kinky, synthetic palettes that went hand-in-hand with an unshakable belief in the unpredictable power of visual stimulation. Rejecting the idea that Painting was a self-expressive endeavor, these highly socialized arrangements of shape, color, and texture instead insisted that Painting was a public event, a social exchange at once primal and sophisticated--and always predicated on viewer participation.

Variously indebted to Edward Ruscha's mind-bending conflation of reality and its representation, and to Lari Pittman's head-spinning orchestrations of cosmopolitan consciousness, these consummately crafted images also took on trips that literally went nowhere, but left us in significantly different positions--visited, as it were, by alien sensibilities.